Production update 2023-07-29 (Patreon)

Hello!

Today I bring very exciting news. I made progress in a pretty huge way, and it's gonna make the whole editing process go so much faster! This is the equivalent of finishing the whole map view + objective + bomb and fairy counters for the Zelda 1 run before I started editing proper.

I have made a TAS replica of BlazeM's run, it syncs, and it's close enough to the original to show all the luring strategies! But not just that: I also wrote a LUA script (by butchering IsoFrieze's After Effects export script) that takes all the guard positional data and exports it into After Effects keyframes format that I then imported into After Effects! I made a level map using Tolos's new map tool, and matched everything up together.

The instant I pasted that data and wrote a simple expression to convert level coordinates into screen coordinates, it worked instantly and perfectly. And by "the instant", I mean, "in the hour and a half it took me to manually open the keyframe data .csv file, copy the contents to one layer, open the layer, open the effects, set the keyframes to Hold instead of Linear, close the file, and repeat for every one of my 76 layers, and try not to die of boredom". Anyway, the result looks incredible!

This is the whole level map (well, excluding the final section that overlaps with the top part, I switch to that view at 6:00 into the run). It's hard to see the details, but of course we can zoom in to a pretty high level of detail and see things up close.

There we go! This is my recreation of Blaze luring in 6 guards (orange dots are patrol guards) to blow them up by shooting at computers.

I'm going to show this view next to the game in sections where it's important to see the behaviour of the guards off screen and the effects of the various luring strategies. Of course, there's gonna be a light amount of editing involved each time I do this, but the whole framework is done!

Well... almost done. I have one thing left to work on, and it's the target position of the guards. I have the data, I just need to write some expressions for a target icon where I can simply set the guard number and it will automatically put the target where that guard is currently going to. It shouldn't be too complicated, I just have that one detail left to work out.

Recording

On Thursday I also started recording. The script is a little bit shorter (~4300 words) than what I'm used to (6000-8000) so the progress is unusually quick!

I haven't started "properly" editing but as you can see, the work I've been doing is gonna be huge later down the line. Also, I guess I can also add that this video's sponsor will be Brilliant, which I'm quite excited about! It's a sponsor that I think meshes particularly well with my content and that I'm quite happy to talk about, since I wholeheartedly believe in the value they add to society. Bettering your knowledge and skills is the best thing you can do with your free time.

That's it! I'm excited for the week to come. I've worked out pretty much everything and I can start blasting through the editing process with ease!