2014/2015 (Patreon)
Published:
2014-12-27 16:56:36
Imported:
2021-07
Content
Hi All,
The new year is coming on which has me thinking about what I should be working on in the future. This time last year I decided it might be interesting to attempt videos on more independant/small games and as a result I put out a few videos on those in 2014, namely: The Stanley Parable, Uplink, Dustforce and Antichamber. Unfortunately this is only a fraction of what I had hoped to do as I quickly found that doing smaller games wasn't quite as simple as I thought it would be. Just because a game is small doesn't mean it's any less worthy of a solid analysis so I spent quite a bit of time on these videos. Antichamber in particular took me a very long time to write up, perhaps longer than any other review I've ever done. It's nice to look at these games in-depth but the end result is just a ten minute video for you where I might have been able to put out a thirty minute video on a larger game instead. After realising how disappointed I was with my output this year this is what led me to abandon this small game focus and return to something bigger like the Mario series.
On the positive side if we look at my larger videos this year I put out Shadow of the Colossus, The Wonderful 101, Dark Souls 2, New 'n' Tasty, Mario 64 and Sunshine. I'm very proud of how all these ones have turned out and I think they show I've been getting better as time goes on, hopefully you agree.
Anyway 2015 is shaping up to be a bigger year for games than 2014 was. I'm particularly interested in Bloodborne, The Phantom Pain, Zelda U, Persona 5, Infinifactory and - hopefully - Spire. The immediate plan is to finish up the Mario series, focus on the Dark Souls commentary a lot of you have been asking about and then hopefully do something on the Zero Escape series. After that I'm not really sure but I don't think there will be a shortage of games to talk about in the coming year.
Despite the indie game stuff not really working out I'm glad I tried it and would like to try something different again next year. This year I put out the video on Pac-Man/Scoring which I suppose is a sort of spiritual sequel to the Tetris video a year before that. Both of those are unique compared to my other stuff since they're more about a single topic rather than a whole game. They've never been as popular as my main videos but some of you seem to really like these and, most importantly, they don't seem to take as much work as my regular videos. I think it's easier to write something that focuses on just one element rather than stringing together a series of observations like I normally do. I'd like to try putting out a few more of these next year and I'm currently thinking of a few topics that might interest me in that regard.
The plan for next year is pretty simple then, I want to focus on putting out more standard reviews but I might also put out some smaller videos on certain aspects of game design if something interests me. In theory the extra videos shouldn't detract from my main workload so hopefully they'll just be little bonuses. Whether or not I'll stick to this - or if it will even work - I don't know but I'm always looking to improve and part of that is doing something different every once in a while.
I'm thankful for the support you've all shown me, it's been a great couple of years so far and I'm optimistic that the next one will be the best yet.