Post-Mortem: Finally... a Successor to Hotline Miami

One of the earliest conversations I had with Sparky was when he asked me…

"Can you lose talent?"

My answer was of course, look at the amount of talented people who fell off later in their careers.

I bring this up because that's what it felt like earlier this year.

It felt like after I made "I Love Racing Games, They Suck!" it somehow felt like I'd forgotten how to edit, write, or even just think about games in a serious manner. Looking back on it, burnout's likely the cause, as that project was yet another case of staying up all night multiple days in row, not working, but trying to work, and being met by Adobe's greeting card.

That's the most stressful part about content creation.

It's not the creation part.

That's the best.

That's the high.

That's the thing that keeps people going in this business.

What's stressful is when you've built 98% of the content, and that final 2% is taking longer to produce than the last 98%. Whether it's to do with rendering, troubleshooting errors, or striking off every little detail regarding descriptions, music lists, filters, etc.

That's been more-or-less the case of every video I've made for the past 2-3 years. This stress I think came into a collision with a dose of existentialism.

There's a video I share with people of RocketPoweredMohawk mocking delusional Formula 1 fans raving about a controversy that was six months old, by showing JFK being shot and saying "That's a proper scandal."

It really summarized my feelings on video-game coverage.

All this rage.

All this tension.

All these words.

All these affects you have on people's daily lives…

And we're talking about video-games.

That's not to say nothing matters. Noodle just did an excellent video about things that very much matter in video-games. However, they will never matter more than my health, my family, my life, and in that context, I've been thinking about why I value gaming content in the first place.

When I started, it was about Objectivity.

That changed.

Later, it was about Completionism.

That changed.

Now, it's about what it's always been about deep down.

Perspective.

I believe when a perspective is shared, it should do one of two things for an individual…

1. Reevaluate their beliefs.
2. Reinforce their beliefs.

It is impossible for all of us to see all there is about a piece of work, and one of most beautiful things about art is that the exact same art can have a different effect on every viewer. So when I've finished a game and go to Youtube, I'm not interested in history lessons, boss fights, or whether or not a game's worth the money on anything outside a traditional IGN style review.

I want to hear someone's perspective.

I want to hear someone's experience.

Because through that, you get a story.

What does all of this have to do with my video?

I don't feel I've practiced what I preached. 

I did all of the things I said not to be interested in.

I was too concerned with giving the game its "fair" shake, informing people of everything it does top to bottom, listing faults in a bid to stop someone saying I'm shilling.

I gave the context of the indie industry at the time for those who didn't play Hotline Miami.

I showcased several other Top Down Shooters to make a bigger point about sub-genres.

I did all of these things that I don't really care about.

"Boss Fights are frustrating in this Roguelite."

Wow.

That's so interesting…

I cared enough about them to write these things, and capture them, and edit them, but they weren't done for me, they were done for a hypothetical viewer who would go "what about the boss fights?"

And that's what I want to stop doing.

Ironically, what confirmed all of this for me was seeing the negative reactions, and how uniform they were. That's not to be so brash as to say they were all invalid, one of them was so valid in-fact, I changed the title to what they suggested.

No, it's that I quickly realized all of my efforts to qualm a hypothetical viewer's instincts were for naught.

I still got accused of shilling.

I still got accused of hating Hotline Miami.

I still got accused of deliberately misleading viewers.

And it made me think…

Why didn't I just make the video I wanted to make?

It would've been shorter, more direct, more unique, and would've likely garnered the same reaction from the same people, with the difference being, I would've been happier with it.

I don't hate my video.

I'm massively pleased with its overall reception. I'm super happy that several people bought OTXO and loved it just as much as I did. I'm pleased that the developer didn't seem to have any objections, and is already in the midst of working on another game with a new eyes watching.

But going forward… I want to live up to my word of making videos for me.

This Post-Mortem has been more of a confessional, so let me at least end on a couple technical details.

Firstly…

I still edit my scripts a lot.

Granted, a good chunk of these colored lines don't represent rewritten lines, but lines I needed to re-record, because my narration wasn't up to snuff.

I honestly still feel like a novice when it comes to my narration, because I can't nail a consistent tone. Monday I'll sound one way, Tuesday, I'll sound like an entirely different person.

Part of that is the environment itself, the previous microphone I used (Apex 46) didn't need as much soundproofing as my current Rode NT1, so I finally bit the bullet and bought more Foam Padding for my walls.

Make your jokes here.

I'm considering voice-over courses, as it occurred to me that I've been doing this for longer than 5+ years, and yet, I still operate as if I'm that 19 year old writing for COGConnected, and the bosses are going to take away my privileges any moment.

Secondly…

I think I've nailed down DaVinci Resolve's rendering process.

For those that don't know, I switched editing software from Adobe Premiere to DaVinci Resolve. It's actually not the first time I've done this, those might remember my "Games Should Leave You Wanting More" video where I did the same thing.

That was a nightmare though, because I spent days rendering the video trying to get an export without obnoxious sound glitches appearing at random points in the video with no consistency.

It was genuinely one of the worst editing experiences I've had, which was a shame, because everything other than that rendering process was a notable improvement from Adobe Premiere.

Yet I had to go back to the unfulfilling marriage after the mistress beat me with a bat.

However, Adobe's been such a pain in the last while, and only getting worse overtime, that I decided to go back to the mistress, and talk them out of the bat.

They still raised it, and there's a period there where I thought I was being hit by it, but after spending days, and being ready to do so this time, I think I finally figured out the workflow of exporting a project in uncompressed hi-res, before importing it into Adobe and rendering it in H264 for Youtube.

Now… that means I've still got Adobe in my life, and I'll have to cross that bridge later should I decide to switch fully to Resolve, but I do intend on making my next video on it.

In the meantime… I hope the weekend treated you all well. 

Thank you for supporting me through this long-haul, and being able to improve things for the future, be it software or equipment, is directly because of y'all!

It means more than I can ever write.

Best wishes,
Raycevick