Architect Address June 2024 (Patreon)

Hello hello and welcome to this, the Architect Address, a very special series of videos just for you patrons all about what’s going on with the channel lately and what irritating delays I’ve been dealing with. Whhooof. Okay, so before we get into any of the stuff I actually want to talk about let’s just quickly run over me getting sick/ I made a whooole song and dance about feeling really psyched for the next video but lo and behold that’s when the world decided to give me Covid. Or - at least what I think was covid. I couldn’t speak without coughing a bunch, my sinuses were so inflamed they were pressing on my tearducts and making me cry randomly, it was pretty miserable and I wasn’t up to doing anything for just under two weeks, putting me way behind. I’m about 90% sure it’s some new variant going around, a lot of people I know that I didn’t infect if you’re wondering have had something similar so hopefully i’m immune now and we can all move on with our lives. Bleh.

Right. As for things I actually think are worth discussing, let’s talk about the music in the videos because I’ve seen a few people asking about that and I can’t recall if I’ve ever spoken about it before. So, unless you’re completely not paying attention you’ll know I like to only take music from the games I talk about in any given video and I’ll be completely honest, I don’t actually know why I do this - it’s one of those little rules that just become slowly embedded into the way you think about making stuff. I think it’s a nice change of pace from a lot of youtube videos which use this horribly generic podcast background music or just ingame sound effects which I always find horribly jarring - especially when they do both. It is, however, quite hard to find music sometimes because I can never quite work out what makes for good background music, there’ll be some stuff I really like that just constantly distracts from me talking and then I’ll stumble onto some rando unanmed track in a videogame soundtrack out of desperation and it’ll be a perfect fit. I think I’ve had the most luck with quote and quote chill music and there’s probably something to be said about having music with a beat that matches the cadence of human speech if it’s too fast I feel like I’m talking over it rather than it accompanying the speech, and too slow and droning and it fucks with how easy it is to hear. 

I occasionally consider dropping this tradition and just using generic theme appropriate game music but I think I’d run into the problem of searching for the exact right track and it actually taking just as long to find what I’m looking for. I do always manage to come up with something though, as I recall the only video I outright gave up on for that was the among us video way back in the day where most of the games I was talking about literally didn’t even have music and even then among us only has like, one. So I think I’ll keep doing it, hopefully I’ve managed to show people some cool videogame tracks as well, I consider a lot of it, especially the after the video segment where I get to come up with some dumb catchy music to be all part of the recommendations side of the channel which is something I really enjoy doing.

Right, anyway, onto the videos and lemme tell you we’ve had two stinkers, one mild whiff and one big rancid mess. Let’s do the first one first and by that I mean let’s start with the one all about Elements. So, the interesting thing about this one is that the framing around elements didn’t come until surprisingly late in the project and that’s due to two reasons. First is that I couldn’t really find a good name for the concept I wanted to discuss, originally I was going to go with ontologies which was complicated, or categorization systems which was too wordy and eventually I settled on typologies because the elements were literally the listed example of what one of those was and I figured it’s a good enough foundation to base things around. 

Second, is that for reasons that I can literally only put down to divine providence, I had a conversation with someone about fortnite, went to download it out of curiosity to see how the game had changed in the three years or so since I’d played and found out they were doing an avatar the last airbender themed event which gave me an excuse to do a silly intro gag and also gave me lots of footage to use for various parts of the video. For the intro I had to really lean on google translate to not just translate my jokes into a format that displayed nicely but also made sense and I think I was mostly successful? A few people seemed to get the gags which was fine with me but they were predictably riddled with errors. Ultimately I’m not sure whether making a reference to a coming up on 20 year old childrens cartoon for my video was a great idea but I had fun with it and like I said just having some nice background footage of stuff that looks nice was sorely needed in this video because it’s surprisingly hard to get nice footage of just… someone using a fire attack or wind magic or whatever. A lot of the games that feature elemental systems have really clunky UIs all over the place and very complex displays that aren’t very intuitive at a glance so getting footage for this one was harder than you’d think.

I think one thing that I was mixed on for this video was how much to dumb it down, because I really didn’t want to fall into the trap of oh wow red is da colour of blood and angry it mean danger because not only was that insulting intellectually but I’d also… er… already done it before. However, focusing purely on high level more abstract stuff might put people off and I definitely spent too long talking about the history of the elements and the sociological roots of typological thinking even if I personally find it very interesting. End of the day I think I struck a decent balance but it’s always a struggle to know how much intellectual groundwork to lay and how much to actually talk about games because I think my intros have a tendency to get a little waffly.

Overall the video did… not great but not awful, I think the thumbnail is to blame here - it’s really hard to display the elements in a visually interesting way without literally ripping off the avatar symbols or doing some VFX work I have neither the skill nor time for. I ended up settling on just pasting some cool looking creatures over a magic the gathering card landscape that reflected all the elements but it’s not a very dynamic image. Once again I just hate hate hate the marketing side of this job. I am so bad at it but looking back at my earlier work I am definitely getting better. Kind of. So I suppose that’s something.

And finally we get onto the most recent video which… bleh… what a mess this one was. So first of all, emergent narratives is a really really hard subject to get footage of because you need to be able to communicate a changing context clearly and quickly just in the background footage because that’s… all you’re talking about so getting the right footage that actually told these little visual stories was so much harder than usual and that’s not even considering that by their nature most emergent narrative games involve lots of menus and small text and basically this video was a recipe for being not very interesting to watch. I tried my best to purposefully capture specific clips to match what I’m talking about but there’s only so much you can do to make contextless footage of a paradox game interesting. 

Luckily, at least Rimworld is an interesting game to look at at certain points and I had a lot of fun finding what storyline across my many many playthroughs I actually wanted to focus on the Jerbear one I ended up settling on because I felt like it had the most conclusive endpoint a lot of these emergent stories sort of spin out forever and this one had a nice arc of start to end with Jerbear getting executed that made it a good way to intro the concept without having to awkwardly come up with my own ending. Honestly I was spoiled for choice though, I had a doctor that was dying from alzheimer's and desperately tried to turn herself into a zombie to prolong her usefulness and there was another one where I accidentally rolled some sort of special modded scenario where you’re some sort of lizard woman defending a clutch of eggs who all hatch right around the first winter which was hard as nails - loads of options but the Jerbear one was the neatest.

Unfortunately in terms of performance, this one did… maybe the worst in a while. Like, really really bad. I want to put it down to the delay but maybe this one just didn’t resonate with people for some other reason, the storytelling centric videos I like making but never tend do to very well so maybe it’s a perfect storm of bad stuff happening but it’s still a real gutpunch to see all those grey downward arrows and youtube pitying you for your video doing badly. Bleh. Right, I can feel myself wanting to complain more about that but I’m not going to, instead I’ll leave you on the happy note that the elden ring DLC is really really good, hard as nails but really good, go pick it up it’s absolutely massive, way bigger and longer than I thought, great stuff.