Monthly Update: October 2022 – What's Next? (Patreon)

Happy Halloween!

Well done for reaching the end of another month. You made it, and so did we.

Recently, we’ve been talking a lot about the new space: what we want to do with it, how it’ll make life easier. But what does that really mean?

We thought we’d use this month’s update to really explain why it’s so important for the future of what we do.

Where We’re At Now

We make a Let’s Play series but we make it in a far more time-intensive way than the other ones out there. We’ve alluded to this a few times on Shield Up and elsewhere, but what is really involved and how much does it differ?

Here’s a little diagram that roughly compares the timelines involved in making a typical hour-long Let’s Play vs. an episode of Retry: Demon’s Souls. We made 100s of regular Let’s Plays while at IGN and elsewhere. Both are obviously generalisations, but they give you a rough sense of the relative time involved in both.

Typical Let’s Play

• Pre-Production: typically, there’s very little. You may do some basic research into the game you’re about to play, but more often than not, this phase amounts to little more than downloading the game. 30 minutes.
• Production: you play the game. Often this is just a small section and most of the time you’re going in blind. Maybe you film for an hour or two. Depending on the difficulty of the game, you may achieve quite a lot of progress in this time. 1 hour.
• Post-Production: this varies. This type of Let’s Plays tend to be edited quickly, especially for new games because creators want to get them online quickly. Sometimes this can be as simple as top-and-tailing the video with an intro and outro graphic, before exporting. 1 hour.

Retry: Demon’s Souls

• Pre-Production: we spend a lot of time considering what will fall into each shooting session and ultimately each episode. We like our episodes to feel like just that – episodes. Ideally each one builds towards an ending, or has a major event within it, so each one feels purposeful, not just another random section of the game. People have favourite episodes of Retry, and this is a big reason why. This planning takes time, especially with a FROM game, where there’s so much to do, so many side-quests and NPCs. 2 hours.
• Production: this is pretty constant for Let’s Plays – production takes the time it takes to play the game. One slight difference is that FROM games are challenging, so it may take more time to achieve what we would typically want to cover in an episode. If we hit a wall, there’s no way around it. Sometimes, especially with boss-centric episodes, this leaves us with several hours of footage for a single episode. 3 hours.
• Post-Production: we put a lot of work into our editing, often doing multiple passes on a single episode and when done this way, it’s a massively time-consuming process. We often edit hours and hours of footage down into a single episode, making them richer and funnier than if they were more loosely put together. We create custom graphics, custom intros, at times we’ve even hand-drawn some of the overlays used in our series. It’d be easier to edit less and have more episodes, but they wouldn’t feel the same. We also recently upgraded the show to 4K, so a lot of the stages – transferring files, exporting – all take a little longer too. This is an essential part of what makes our show our show. 20 hours.

Now there’s one more big thing to add to the above.

Unlike a lot of other big channels, we don’t have a team of editors and production assistants. It’s just the three of us, not only appearing on the show but also putting it together. We believe editing our show is an integral part of what makes it our show. It’s just as important as us appearing in an episode. The same goes for pre-production. This approach is key for us.

But this creates one big, fundamental bottle-neck: while we’re filming, which for a Souls game takes ages, we can’t do any editing. And vice versa: while we’re editing, no filming can take place. This is before you factor in how much time we put into post-production on each episode. What you end up with is this flip-flopping between filming and editing, one continually halting to give way to the other, which hugely slows things down.

On Retry: Demon’s Souls, we got around this by filming in two big blocks and then going into post-production for nearly 5/6 months. It was the only way to deliver what we wanted to make, without this constant attention shifting. This is an intentional choice, and how we want to make our show.

Now it’s just not possible to do this with Retry: Elden Ring. It’s far too big. We don’t want to disappear for a year to get all the episodes ready at once. We’re still discussing how we want to approach that show, but we want to do it in a slightly different way.

So we’ve been thinking a lot about how we can change things, and there are a few ways we could make the show faster.

1. Spend less time on pre-production. Essentially, just wing-it: see what we get in the can. We might screw up quests, miss areas, lock out NPCs, and see a fraction of what the game has to offer. This isn’t happening.
2. Reduce the quality of post-production. Don’t shoot in 4K, edit less thoroughly, don’t add in any extra bits. This isn’t happening.
3. Hire more people to help edit the show. While we have used a trusted freelancer, Rich Bearpark, to help us edit series like SPOOKIES: The Quarry and 3 Ways, we still do a pass of every episode ourselves and we make multiple changes on these passes to make sure the shows feel like our shows. But the FROM games are different. It’s very hard for a freelancer to jump onto a project like that and know what needs to stay unless they’re incredibly familiar with the games. Even then, we feel enormous ownership of the show and want to edit it ourselves, so this isn’t happening either. (Now hiring people in other supporting roles to help us may be something for us to consider in 2023. This could definitely free us up to focus more on the show.)
4. Improve our technology and processes. Both of these can powerfully increase the rate at which we can make the show. It takes time to figure out exactly what we need and a break in production, so each element can be re-examined. This is definitely happening.

While technically it’s possible to produce a version of Retry in a much quicker way, most of these solutions involve compromises we are unwilling to make. It’s not what we want to make.

Thankfully we don’t have to make these compromises since we’re supported directly by you – whether you’re a patron or have bought one of our T-shirts in the past. This support allows us to hold firm and pursue exactly what we want to make, and we’ll always be deeply thankful for this privilege.

This is why setting up the studio properly, and taking the time to rethink a lot of our processes, is so important right now, and why we need to prioritise it in the months ahead. Making Retry to the standard we want will always take more time than a typical Let’s Play, but with some changes we should be able to make it in a far more efficient way.

This is vital. Not only do we want to make Retry: Elden Ring our best-ever series but we want to make it in a way that allows us to produce other things alongside it, too. We want to work in a healthier and more productive way, with less looming deadlines and more creative freedom. Here’s the impact that’ll have on our production.

New Shows and What They Give Us

So what does that mean for the next few months?

Figuring out what to do with the studio requires time: time to think, time to drill holes and thread wires, time for things to break, and time for them to be fixed. While we spend the next few weeks, and potentially months, figuring all of this out, we don’t want to halt production indefinitely, leaving the channel empty and the Patreon bare.

So since late summer (just after Powers’s birthday), we’ve been filming every Monday and Tuesday. It’s allowed us to film several new series, which have all immediately gone into post-production. It’s a great way of working, as it allows us to produce new things steadily and work further in advance. It’s how we want things to run in the New Year.

But that means we have the next few months all mapped out, and are excited to share that with you for the first time.

Now for a little tease...

This is a roadmap for the month’s ahead. We haven’t yet broken ground on Retry: Elden Ring beyond some provisional episode planning, but that’s what we’re working towards.

Having all of this lined up, means we don’t have to worry about next week’s video or even next month’s. It’s a great feeling, as we can really focus on the studio and do things properly without pressure. Getting this right is so important, as it really sets us up for what’s next. There’s so much we wanted to do when we launched RKG and now it feels like we're finally getting to that place.

Thank you for all your continued support and enthusiasm for what we make.

RKG x