Monthly Update: February 2023 (Patreon)

Hey everyone, here’s a little update on what we’ve been up to this month. We’ve got a new show to tell you about and lots to tell you about our studio renovation.

SPOOKIES: Dead Space

Dead Space. What a game!

Powers literally knew nothing about the series before playing it, and now it’s one of his favourite games we’ve ever played.

Despite us getting steadily sick, and Gav drinking 7 lemsips in 24-hours (do NOT try this at home), we filmed it over the course of 4 days. It’s currently in edit, but you won’t have to wait that long to see it.

Day One: Setting Up the Shot

The first episode premieres on Saturday, 11th March, and we’re going to present it as a YouTube premiere, so if you’d like to, you can watch it along with us and the RKG community for the first time live.

Unlike a lot of recent series, we’re not going to be dropping all 12 episodes of SPOOKIES: Dead Space at once. Instead, the first episode will go live for everyone at the same time, and Early Access patrons will always be able to watch the next episode one week early.

Why are we doing this? It’s for a few reasons. We want to continually experiment with our offering on Patreon. There’s no right way to do this, and it’s always about balancing a great experience for the people who can and want to support us directly through Patreon, while maintaining an inclusive experience for those who can’t. We want to continue to innovate on this front in the coming year. We probably will still drop some series all at once, like we just did with the SPOOKIES: Double Bill, but there’s no one-size-fits all with what we’re making and what we want to do in the future. Going forward we want to use Patreon in interesting and surprising ways.

A Post SPOOKIES Pint

Also, another advantage of doing it this way is it allows us to start airing the show much sooner. If we had to wait to get all 12 episodes done, it wouldn’t be going out until late-April or even May.

We’re really excited for you to see it. It’s definitely the best but also most-involved game we’ve ever had for a series of SPOOKIES. So while there’s plenty of jumps there’s also a lot of combat and deaths, too.

Studio Update

Good news and bad news on the studio front. 

From last month’s update, you may remember we got in Alan to help us paint and get one of our side rooms ready to be turned into the studio we’re going to film all our shows in.

Bad news. We got another man in, Gareth, who specialises in designing bespoke studios, and he said it was too small. Much too small. We knew it was going to be a squeeze, but thought we could put up with the cosiness. Gareth wasn’t having it. He’s recommended us using the main space, as it’s way more suitable and presents a much bigger canvas to play around with.

Initially, this was a little frustrating, as for so long, we’ve mapped out how we’ve wanted to use this amazing space. But after Gareth left, we thought about it a lot and he’s right. We realised why on earth are we trying to cram ourselves into a space smaller than Gav’s spareroom?

The Studio We Never Knew (But it'll make a lovely podcast room)

Now the good news. We realised that filming is at the heart of everything we do, so we should make it the best we possibly can, particularly with a project as massive as Retry: Elden Ring on the horizon. So we’re currently rejigging our plans to build a studio in the main room. We’ll find other uses for the side rooms – one will still definitely be turned into a podcasting studio. But the main room is going to be split into two: one half reserved for our desks; the other, transformed into a proper professional studio.

It’s sometimes hard to see something differently when you’ve lived with one idea for so long. But after spending some time with the new plan, we know this is going to give us much more. Not only will this allow us to record things like Let’s Plays in a more comfortable environment – it opens up the possibility for the other types of things we can record. Now we just need to get Gareth on it.

Right, that’s it for February. We’re excited to get cracking with the studio build over the next couple of months while you enjoy Dead Space and the Double Bill. We’ll keep you updated with how it’s all going, but we’re making progress on the best filming setup we’ve ever had.

RKG x