New Video (Accuracy Doesn't Matter) + Behind The Scenes (Patreon)

Hey everyone, guess who actually managed to upload again? Apologies for the silence but to my credit, at least this one didn’t take 3 years to finish, that’s gotta count for something right? If you’ve not already seen it you can view it by clicking here :) (video).  Its a video about accurate depictions of guns in games and why they aren't important.

In this post I wanna talk about a few things. Namely the completion of this latest video, the future for myself/my channel and also to offer an apology/explanation for suddenly closing my patreon months ago without communicating why. I’ll start with that last part.

Why I temporarily closed my Patreon

Anyone whose been here prior to this current upload may have noticed that I abruptly closed my patreon creator page out of nowhere only about a month after I uploaded my previous video about Arcade Racing games. For that I'm sorry. Short answer why is that after the toll that video took to create, i was feeling incredibly burnt out and wasn't making any progress on anything new and the guilt that came from that lack of progress led me to close the page as I felt it wasn't fair to be charging people monthly for something I wasn't doing. This isn’t the first time I've done this, it happened shortly after I initially opened my patreon after uploading my Reload Animations video 4 years ago. I also closed it back then for the same reason.

Thing is it probably won’t be the last either but this time if the guilt/procrastination starts catching up to me again I promise I'll at least post a notice here 1 week in advance to let people know its going to happen. But I also hope to work a little more consistently so it doesn’t come to that (more on that later). With that all being said I wanna talk about the recent vid and future projects.

The Video (Accuracy Doesn't Matter)

In this section i want to cover the major beats regarding this videos creation. So this vid didn’t take nearly as long for me to finish than I expected (around 9 months). It’s mostly because I wanted to work on a much smaller scale compared to the Arcade Racing vid, where that vid had a dozen different sets and scenes, this video consists mostly of only 1 3D space as the main set. The “Armory” Scene.

But another big reason why it took far less time to finish is thanks to the Arcade Racing vid. One of my goals with that video was to start building a 3D asset library that I could easily pull from to help build and populate scenes with objects. It helped me to give any space that dense, lived-in kinda feel, y’know?  And considering how much shit i made for that vid it came in very handy when I started working on this one. A lot of original models had to be made for this video but it was a lot less of a time sink than it would’ve otherwise been.

Nonetheless this let me focus on the real star of video. The Guns. I ended up modelling a total of 21 guns featured in this video. Not all of them were made explicitly for this video (more on that later too) but all of them were modelled to be as modular as possible. most of them have their own suite of attachments that can easily be removed or fitted on to other guns that have the same rail size as is the case in real life.

Here's a preview of every single weapon from the video in no particular order

AK47

AK105

AKS-74U

AR-15

BENELLI M3

M45A1

CZ BREN 805 A2

GLOCK 45

HK 416

HK MP7

KRISS VECTOR

LEMAT/LEMAT MKII

M16

REMINGTON M870

SMITH & WESSON MODEL 19

SIG P226

IWI TAVOR TS12/ MX GAURDIAN

UZI

CURSED WINCHESTER MODEL21

NERF MAVERICK REV-6

Of all the above guns, the maverick is the only one i've held in real life :)

NEW CHARACTER

As with the Arcade Racing video, i still wanted to evolve my content in some form which is what lead to me redesigning my character again, ultimately settling on a 3D Design. Not gonna lie, this was really intimidating to approach at first as ive never been good at drawing or modelling people, nor have i ever animated a 3D Character model. This was going to be my first time at that.

Despite that, having now done it i can safely say that i find 3D character animation far easier and faster to work with than traditional 2D. I've still got a lot to learn and improving to do but there's just something so liberating about how quickly you can iterate on posing and blocking that makes it so much easier to work with compared to my previous 2D workflow. Any future vids will likely have a new 3D character model in them as im pretty happy with the style i settled on and the aesthetic choice to depict my characters emotions via the little 2D pixelart icons throughout all the dialogue scenes.

As always, all the 3D work was done in Blender with the pixelart texturing being done in Aseprite

Anyway, those are the major things i wanted to talk about with the videos creation. As always this video was edited in both Premiere Pro and Adobe After effects. There really isn't anything sexy about that part of the workflow which is why i never show any screenshots of it. I guess if you're interested here's what my premiere timeline ended up looking like. What a nightmare! (derogatory)

If anyone has any questions regarding other elements of the vid i'll do my best to answer. But now i wanna move onto what the future holds regarding my goals and my content.

The Future

Truth be told I'm a little uncertain about what i wanna do next. I don't currently have any ideas for future video essays but im sure that'll change. Thing is, as much as i enjoy working on video essays and connecting with people more casually through them I really want to create something original. This could come in 2 forms, a short animated film idea that i've had for a long time, or a game. Since i've fleshed out these game ideas a lot more imma talk about it.

I've got too many game ideas (not gonna lie, most of them are zombie games) to count but one that i've quietly been working on using the Godot engine is a short zombie game that's heavily influenced by Shaun of The Dead, specifically that one scene where he walks to the convenience store (if you know, you know).

So far what I've most been working on is environment art assets and weaponry which is what i hinted at earlier when i said that not all those previous gun models were made for the video. All of them are game ready but specifically the Benelli M3, SIG P226 and S&W Model 19 were made specifically for this current game idea ive been working on. I'll reveal more about it as it continues to manifest and in all likelihood i'll make some devlog style videos documenting the process to be put on my channel. Just like my vids any Behind the Scenes content will be posted here for patrons.

It's far to early for me to be talking about release/pricing but at the very least i ideally plan to make these small games free to everyone supporting me here and downloadable via Itch.io.

Conclusion :)

By no means do i plan to stop making video essays or the content people are used to expecting from me. For now though im gonna take a short break to try and brainstorm ideas for the next vid as well as continuing work on this funny little game project. I hope to have more to show soon.

Over all i just want to thank all of you, both new and old who have come to support me. It is greatly appreciated and i wouldn't be able to do it without you. If anyone has any questions about anything please feel free to reach out here and i'll do my best to respond. Thank you again