The shape of things to come
This post is also available on Patreon.
Is summer really over? There's a good reason for my radio silence...
Personal Update
From mid June through all of July and the first half of August, my home's air conditioning has been varying states of broken, even as Florida went through a miserable heat dome. The indoor temperature was thus, at varying points throughout that period, over one hundred degrees Fahrenheit. Even at midnight, which is when the below image was taken. For the rest of the world, that's almost 38 degrees Celsius.
So, needless to say, I tried to spend as little time as possible at home during that period. Combined with a personnel shakeup at the dayjob that's had me working longer and harder hours, and some interpersonal commitments and emergencies, I've been very busy and very, very tired.
While the dayjob situation is developing, the air conditioning is (mostly) fixed. I'm excited to get back to work on videos, starting by picking up where I left off...
Current Project
Before I was rudely interrupted by hellish temperatures and humidity, I was actually making good headway on multiple big projects at once. This is a free post, so I don't want to overpromise and give away projects that might take a good while to surface. I may make a paid post about the other big one that I've been really excited about. But, I'm far enough along with one project that I feel I can announce it:
Pure, Fuel & Nail'd (title TBA)
For some time I've been wanting to explore this trifecta of one-syllable commercial failures. I find each emblematic of different reasons that powersports/motocross video games disappeared in the 2010s.
I purposely avoided turning this into an hours-long analysis of these games; For one, I don't like any of them enough to spend that much of my life on them. But, I do feel each has something interesting to them that's worth discussing, even as we acknowledge their failure. The video is shaping up to be 20-30 minutes long and the core of the script is written, recorded and currently open in Resolve as we speak.
Current aim is an early September release.
The shape of things to come
While the multiplayer grab-bag format I used for my last video and expressed interest in repeating is still on the table, the change in workload in my dayjob has made multi-game videos a bit daunting. These videos will still happen at some point, but are not my current focus.
It can feel a bit hopeless to work on the same thing for months, constantly having to start and stop for a week or two at a time while the rest of life gets in the way.
Some part of me does miss 2020, where I could just be head-down on something for two weeks to a month, living and breathing nothing but that project, ending up with a result that came from an uninterrupted train of thought.
However, the social and economic situation I found myself in then is a million miles from where I am now. For the better, to be clear.
YouTube is no longer the singular pillar of my financial stability, and I'm no longer forcibly isolated from the outside world. These are both positive changes that are having positive influences on my creativity. But with those things comes a lot of external responsibility, commitment and exertion.
Standards
I will also say I'm not entirely pleased with the quality of my work in the last couple of years. I feel out of touch with how I've done things previously and that there's just something missing from my recent output, even as I acknowledge the good parts and things I've learned with time.
With all that in mind, I need to do some thinking about what my future on YouTube looks like.
Change will come in topic, scope, style, and workflow.
For main channel videos, I feel the editing production value is not what it once was and that I've not raised my own bar to match my peers. If I could afford it, I would perhaps hire an editor that could devote more time and energy to that side of things than I can personally. This is something to explore in the future, but I may need to start thinking about things I can do in the meantime.
If I hope to both raise the polish and production value of the main videos while also putting them out more frequently, something will have to give, and I think that something is the scope. I've said many times that I need to limit scope creep... before starting a project where I talk about five fucking games in one video.
I love doing that, to be clear. But after this Pure/Fuel/Nail'd vid, and barring the other big project that I've been working on intermittently at the same time, I think I need to spend a while working on smaller, manageable projects about one or maybe two games at a time. At least until I figure out a style and direction that I'm happy with.
I do have a couple of ideas to this end, including a potential format for a series on the communities behind old online games, but I'm not looking to rush into anything just yet. I want to focus on getting this current video done while things stabilize in my personal life, and then wait for a topic to speak to me and go from there.
Trying new things
I've got other formats I want to try as well; Seeing friend Julian's foray into less structured, less produced content on his side channel has been inspirational. I'm anxious about how launching a second channel would go when I'm barely feeding my main one, but do have tentative plans for one anyways, as I don't feel less-edited content fits what the audience expects from the main Kacey channel.
Shorts are also something I've found oddly liberating as a creative, despite the seemingly reductive nature of the more popular styles. As someone who struggles with brevity (evidenced by this very post, I'd argue) they are a unique challenge.
If you missed it, I have done a few shorts reviewing things like J2ME mobile games and Nintendo DS games. My audience reach with these has been... less than I'd hoped... but they are still fun to make and I'd like to continue, upping the quality as I figure it out.
Lastly, I hope to utilize Patreon and my own website more often as a creative outlet. Writing something to immediately post into the world usually gets the blood flowing. Both platforms need some work to look and feel how I want them, though.
In closing...
Typing all this out has been cathartic. I have more to say about my change in approach, but I need time to figure out exactly what that approach looks like before I can share anything.
I hope hearing from me for the first time in a while has brought you something. I hope it won't be so long before we speak again.
<3 K