GLV

Triumphant Return

2013-01-03T18:35:00.004-05:00

It's been awhile and I'm sure nobody cares as nobody actually reads this blog lol That's ok though because that's not the point. I'm documenting what I learn as I sail the angry seas of video game movie stardom and if I do indeed succeed, this blog will allow me to take what I've learned and sell it as a book much like Julian Dibbell who wrote the book "Play Money: Or, How I quit My Day Job and Made Millions Trading Virtual Loot". His book was simply a compilation of the events chronicled on his blog as he learned about virtual economies while playing Ultima: Online. It's a good book if you haven't read it but likely won't apply to todays MMO's.

Since August a lot has changed. I've started a business and am back working full time which makes playing video games and creating movies that much harder. I have released several videos during this time but not able to make complete videos like I was doing earlier (in that all collectables for all levels were covered).

Dishonored was a fun game but the lone video I made didn't get many views. It was my first time putting a voice over in which was a little nervous because I wasn't sure how people would react to "me". Thankfully it was a non-issue.

Hitman: Absolution was much better than Dishonored and definitely one of my contenders for game of the year 2012. I was able to make two videos which did pretty well.

The first was a walk through for the King of Chinatown level on how to earn the some of the side challenges. The second was similar but covering the mission Hunter and Hunted.

Both did very well but I was only able to monetize one of the videos which was very confusing and vexing. Due to time constraints I wasn't able to finish the Hitman video series I had planned. It didn't help that Far Cry 3 came out as well which totally grabbed my full attention. I didn't get into Far Cry or Far Cry 2 but this game is amazing.

Being an open world game I was finding it difficult to come up with ideas for videos. I ended up collecting many hours of footage of my play time with the game and was able to compile two videos, neither of which are getting many views lol. It's all about what you learn though and these two videos were part of an experiment. I have long been irritated by the fact that YouTube arbitrarily will let me monetize some videos but not others. I can't find the pattern but I suspected it was due to the music in the games. I play FC3 with the music off which adds a nice affect but would also let me upload any video without worrying about infringing on the music copyright. Turns out, it's not about the music as only 1 video was monetizable.

While not bringing in big pay days, they certainly helped me learn more video editing tricks. For example during both of these videos I do quite a bit of driving. In the game I'm constantly pausing to look at the map and make sure I'm going the right way. In the videos I edited out the pause and a couple of times put the map on screen in a picture in picture effect to make it look like I could bring up the map without pausing. Nobody has noticed so far lol. I also continued to polish my opening titles by adding random clips of a funny nature.

So this brings an end to my 2012. In all I made $200 since I started my YouTube channel. Not bad for what is essentially a hobby but that was only enough to pay off the price of my Colossus HD Capture card.

One recent morning I received an email. It was an invitation to join a network; this is what I had been working for. I filled out the application and today my channel was officially linked and my how things have changed. Videos I was previously unable to monetize were now monetizable and at a higher rate than I was getting from just AdSense/YouTube. I am very pleased to now be part of the ZoominTV Games network!

We'll see how things pan out but I am very excited and have a renewed sense of enthusiasm with this project. I have accomplished many of the goals I set for myself and learned lots about the process. All of which I was doing essentially part time. I don't spam my videos or do any kinds of advertising really. I simply use key words and try to make videos others will want to search for. All my success is organic YouTube growth which really is impressive but not without its draw backs. Being independent is great at the start but you are limited by what you can do. It's all about joining a network.

Sleeping Dogs - Surprisingly Awesome

2012-08-15T22:56:00.001-04:00

Funny how best laid plans can so quickly change... I first heard of Sleeping Dogs early in the summer in an advertisement that really made the game feel cheap. As a result I basically wrote it off and wasn't too interested. My excitement was all for Darksiders II. My opinion of it changed once I had an opportunity to play it. GTA meets True Crime? Yes please. I started powering my way through it, feeling a sense of urgency to find an angle with which to produce videos out of the game. My initial plan was collectables so I started searching for them, only to discover with quests you can get their locations unlocked on the map, which makes things much simpler.

With that out of the way, I set about trying to find other videos to create. I don't like the idea of "Let's Play" videos. I enjoy watching them, but they're not the kind of videos I want to make. In Sleeping Dogs after you beat a mission you get a score and a rating which determines how much XP you get. I set out replaying some of the missions and figuring out which ones really were just fun to play.

I started with Fast Girls because I love the car. It was fun as hell to just race around the city. It only took a couple of retries until I was good enough to complete the entire level in one go. I learned something very valuable here. If you restart from checkpoint, you reset your health and damage done to your character. In other words, if I just restart until I do that part of the level cleanly, you lose continuity with what happened in the first part of the video. The car would go from damage to no damage and it would be clear to the viewer what had happened. To make the videos interesting, they have to be a single, perfect run.

I went back powering through the early levels as a high level character and cleaned up nicely.

After Bride to Be came The Wedding where I really tore up the level getting a lot of head shots and some pretty good fight footage. Some of the missions really are just a blast to play.

I remember back when I was making GTA videos, there was one called "I got hit" where a guy was going off a big ramp and got hit by an airplane in the air. Just a crazy coincidence that he happened to catch on video. That video went viral before that was even a thing. Some day I hope to catch a white whale like that of my own. In the mean time, I'm glad I was recording when I got run over by a pedestrian.

Sleeping Dogs is an awesome game but this project is also a business. I've got one idea for a video left but otherwise it's time to really start playing Darksiders II and figure out a way to make videos from it as well. The cycle continues....

Release Schedule

2012-07-24T16:01:00.001-04:00

A release schedule has been added indicating which upcoming games will be featured on GLV.

The release dates are subject to change but otherwise it should be straight forward.

The colour coding is indicative as such:

Green = Looking forward to the game, definitely making videos of some kind.

Yellow = Unsure of quality of game or concerns of content for videos.

Red = Strong doubts of the quality of the game.

The Amazing Spider-Man - Reaching My Goal

2012-07-19T15:53:00.001-04:00

With the summer months upon us, and game releases few and far between, I knew The Amazing Spider-Man was going to be the last video-worthy game until August when DarkSiders II is released. I had not played any Spider-Man games previously, and was pretty indifferent to the character, but I owe quite a bit to this game.

I was able to further hone my strategy - the achievements were posted before the game was released which gave me ideas on what I should make the videos on. I decided on some achievement walkthroughs and side misson walkthroughs.

When I first got my hands on the game, the "Sky is the Limit" achievement was my first target. While trying to earn it I also discovered you could power level off of the boss. I released the achievement video, an instructional video on power leveling, "clean victory" and "I'm on a roll" achievements as well.

The real meat and potatoes would come from the collectable videos I released for each chapter. Each level had multiple secret items to hunt down so it was perfect.

I also released a video on how to get all the alternate costumes. Activision included the costumes on the disc but made them time locked - in that they wouldn't unlock until a specified date.

These videos allowed me to complete my first goal of reaching 100,000 views. I was able to help a lot of people and earned a lot of subscribers. I was also able to start earning money as I was invited into the Adsense program - two goals completed off of a game that I didn't even really enjoy. That's the secret to doing well at this game: make it your full time job. It get's pretty boring replaying levels over and over looking for secret items, but the finished product is worth it.

With no other worthy games on the horizon it was time to take a break and live off the work I've already done. It took almost exactly 2 months to earn 100k views, it has taken me less than one month to reach the next 100k. I thought it would take me a year before I could start making money and it took just over two months. Hopefully in a year I'll be making enough money that I can keep this as my full time job. Until then, the unfortunately reality is I have to go back to work soon. Been taking job interviews and will have to pick one shortly. Once that happens real life is going to get in the way of this project and a decline is inevitable. Recently I've begun thinking that I should hire somebody to play the games so that I can just edit the footage. I'm not sure how that would work out, and I sure as hell am not going to pay them much since I'm still running a deficit. We shall see what the future holds.

Lollipop Chainsaw - Sex Sells

2012-07-16T12:47:00.000-04:00

I rented Lollipop Chainsaw while I was still actively playing Dragon's Dogma, so I didn't give it much of a chance and I didn't do a lot with it. It's about a sexy scantily clad teenager who comes from a zombie fighting family of other sexy busty women. I didn't enjoy the game much but it did have some laughs. I had never heard of this game at all and wasn't sure if the gaming public at large did either. The gamefaqs message board wasn't very busy so I took that as a sign. I only played the first couple of levels and while I was considering doing a secrets walkthrough I ended up just doing simple boss battle videos.

The best part of uploading these videos was that I could legitimately use provocative tags on the videos like sexy teen, upskirt, etc. The result? These three videos gathered more views than most of the work I was doing on Dragon's Dogma. There's an ancient Chinese proverb that says "sex sells", no wonder they're now the second largest economy in the world.

Dragon's Dogma - Further Learning

2012-07-16T12:37:00.000-04:00

Dragon's Dogma is a Capcom Action RPG released in May 2012. I took a gamble on it and it payed off because I put in over 140 hours in this game. Unfortunately that time investment did not pay off in views. I learned another lesson with this game: if nobody knows or likes the game, they won't watch your videos. I started by releasing a couple of targeted walkthrough videos that I thought might help the small selection of people who would watch them.

I also tried to mix it up by uploading a funny little easter egg video, but it didn't earn many views

Part of what made Dragon's Dogma so great was that you rented other players pawns and used them in your adventure. Some of the battles I encountered truly felt epic so I created an 'epic battles' playlist, giving credit to the players whose pawns I used during the fight. While not earning a lot of views, it was a good project and one that I'll likely re-use in other RPG games. It also helped serve as a chronicle of my time with the game. I had an idea of turning it into a series and tell a story, but did not follow through. Another idea I'll bank on using someday.

Even projects that aren't as successful as you hope can bring good rewards. I started learning to use professional video editing software which allowed simple things like highlighting an area on screen and adding titles. Furthermore I was able to prove myself with YouTube in terms of uploading non-infringing material and take one step closer to making money. Money I would soon be making off of another sure-fire hit video, a walkthrough on how to make unlimited money. Glitches, cheats, etc = views.

Max Payne 3 - The Maturization

2012-07-15T16:14:00.000-04:00

I played the first Max Payne and was not impressed. It was a choppy, buggy action game built around the novelty of bullet time. Max Payne 3 on the other hand was looking much more impressive and as I needed more content for my burgeoning channel, I picked it up.

As I mentioned in the last post, I was now a YouTube partner which ment I could advertise on my videos, but not make money. I was also hitting a wall in terms of my video editing. Back in the day, I used Windows Movie Maker and Virtualdubmod to trim/edit/compile/encode my videos, but it does not work in this new age of HD videos using MPEG TS (Transport Stream) files. As a result all my early videos are single capture sessions of me completing a goal. The best resource for anything video related is videohelp.com which I used many years ago to learn how to edit with vdub. Amazingly my account from 2003 was still active and they pointed me to TMPGenc 4.0 Xpress which is a handy tool for doing basic trimming.

I started playing the game unsure of what I was going to do with it, but making sure I was recording everything. As a result I had so much footage (largely sloppy, unusable footage) that I knew a full on walkthrough was out of the question. I also learned a very valuable lesson with this game, the longer you record while playing, the more time you need to spend watching your gameplay. I decided to focus on just collecting the golden guns in each level. Since I wasn't able to edit footage together yet, I had to replay every level, multiple times, finding the golden guns and then re-playing them a final time, recording picking up every item. Up until Chapter 7, I was one of the first people to upload these collectable videos. I was incredibly disheartned to learn that other users were somehow uploading complete guides, and I wasn't even done beating the game yet. I contemplated abandoning the series, as it was a lot of work, but decided that would leave the wrong impression of the channel. So I completed the final chapters and it was well worth it.

Below is the entire golden gun collectables walkthrough video collection

I earned a 10's of thousands of views and a lot of subscribers. I learned even more about the process and further defined what the channel will be all about. I'm a small fish in an ocean competing against established players who have many advantages I do not. If this was going to be easy, everybody and their one armed mother would be making money off video game movies. It's going to be a long journey but the end game will hopefully be worth it.

Prototype 2 - The beginning

2012-07-15T15:03:00.000-04:00

With the release of Prototype 2, I knew I needed to make videos again. The game is epic and ripe for those special moments you wish you had caught on video. I dug my old ATI TV Wonder VE capture card out of my desk where it had been sitting in a plastic bag for roughly 6 years, plugged it in to my old desktop computer that was being salvaged for parts and got my capture station back up and running.

The first video I released was 'Bio Bomb Fun' which was mainly just a test to re-learn how to capture, edit and share the videos threw YouTube.

As you can see, the quality is crap. The technology did not age well, but that's really not surprising.

I then released 'Tank Mini Gun vs Goliath' video. It was at this point I knew that if I was going to do this project right, I needed a new capture card.

I purchased the Hauppage Colossus HD video recorder card, plugged it in to my existing mediacenter HTPC and I was set.

'Biobomb Hit n Run' and 'Heller vs Mercer' were released to test the quality and there was no turning back.

I played through the game again on Insane difficulty with the intentions of making walkthrough videos but that didn't really pan out. There's a higher learning curve in creating them than I was expecting. Instead I released the impressive follow up video to my previous battle against the Goliath, this time using only Kung-Fu moves, no super powers.

This was the start of finding my niche. Do impressive things in the game, upload the video, bask in its glory. Didn't get as popular as I was hoping, but that's part of the learning curve. Need subscribers to get hits, need videos to get subscribers. In a further attempt to get views I went out easter egg hunting and found the pedestrian commiting suicide secret.

It was around this time I was invited to join the YouTube Partner Program. My work is starting to pay off and that Hunter Thompson quote is once ringing in my ears.

History

2012-07-15T14:36:00.001-04:00

I began creating game videos in 2004 with the release of Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas under the pseudonym of SINZAR. I started with simple rampage/stunt videos but found huge success with my story videos, The Hitman Diaries. It was a two part series that I was not able to finish due to my own high expectations and the limitations of the console version of the game. Some user has uploaded some of my old videos on YouTube.
I released the video on my own, through my own web space and amassed over 100K views. I even earned the attention of Rockstar Games themselves who sent me a carepackage of stickers. This was a big accomplishment in the pre-YouTube/viral videos/early Machinima days since I had to pay for the websites bandwidth.
I then went back to school with the dream of persuing a directing career, only to end up in the IT field. With the distractions college brings I was not able to continue making videos.
After quitting my job earlier this year I decided to start up a YouTube channel as a project to work on while I look for another job. As I continue to learn 'the game' and find my place I'll be releasing original videos and use this blog to add further context to the project.

As Hunter S Thompson would say, "Anything worth doing is worthy doing right".

Another new adventure

2012-07-15T13:03:00.000-04:00

Going to dip my toe into the world of blogging to help compliment my YouTube channel. Time will be needed to customize the design and find my way around the tools.