#i made a mania version five years ago and it's one of my biggest posts

[blazehedgehog]

I'm curious if at this point you're good enough at writing and video editing, to get reviews out on time, and the gimmick is just held out of legacy. It feels like you could.

There is no gimmick.

This is going to be very “how the sausage is made,” meaning it’s a long post. A very, very long post. So I’m hiding it behind a “read more” tag.

I mean, I guess there kind of was a gimmick, nine years ago when I first started doing video reviews. And that’s because I originally envisioned my video reviews as the same stuff everyone else was doing at the time: older games. I didn’t have a lot of money, so it wasn’t going to be a show for new games. It was going to be whatever I was thinking of and playing at the time, which was universally going to be old games, and usually old games I’d replayed more than once. Astal, Shenmue, Klonoa, etc. Classics and oddities.

Starting with Sonic & Sega All-Stars Racing, I started doing video reviews for new games almost exclusively. I’d get a new game at launch, and from the moment it was in my hands, I’d put together a video review for TSSZ. So, it took me six weeks to put together the All-Stars Racing review. Five weeks for the Sonic Lost World review. And so on.  

When I got bold enough to start doing video reviews in HD, things started taking exponentially longer. DKC Tropical Freeze, Mario Kart 8, etc. all took me around 3 months a piece. Part of that was the methods used to create HD reviews, as my crummy Roxio Gamecap HD required huge amounts of time (weeks, sometimes) to transcode footage out of their broken format in to something Sony Vegas would accept. But I also began to incorporate more artwork in to my reviews, because I wanted to utilize a talent of mine that was beginning to atrophy. It was a good excuse to draw again.

The longest video on my channel is my “How Do We Fix Sonic?” video. It’s 30 minutes and 30 seconds long, and took me 14-16 months to put together. It took more than a hundred drawings, and even some animation, something I’d never done before. It was the biggest video project I’d ever undertaken at the time.

For reference, the Sonic Mania video review I published in July is the exact same length – 30 minutes and 30 seconds. Depending on how you count, the Sonic Mania video review was put together in three months – the same amount of time it took for Tropical Freeze, Mario Kart 8, et al.

I say “depending on how you count” because Sonic Mania came out in August of 2017, in a period of time where I was homeless. I technically had a Sonic Mania video review script written by September of 2017, but we did not find an apartment to move in to until November of 2017. And, even then, when we moved in, my desktop PC was damaged – the motherboard and power supply had suffered an electrical surge when I plugged my system in to an unsafe outlet while staying at my brother’s house in the four intervening months. I spent $200+ on replacement parts and had to rebuild the whole system, something I was not keen on doing in the middle of the holiday season in an unfamiliar town, in an unfamiliar state. I’d just left my childhood home, the place I’d spent 24 years of my life in. It was a nightmare. All of this took place a year ago, and I still feel tremendously homesick. I abandoned everyone, everywhere and everything I ever knew.

So I didn’t get my system rebuilt until March of 2018, and didn’t really get to work on the Sonic Mania video until April. April to May, May to June, June to July. Three months. For a video that was the same length as the longest, most difficult video I’d ever put together for my channel.

Tristan wanted to air my video review on the TSSZ Twitch channel on the day Sonic Mania Plus was launching. I was hoping to get it out before then, but in the end, I think I only had maybe a week (or less) between finishing my video and Plus launching. So it goes.

There’s a small lie in there, however, in that Sega offered us an early review copy of Sonic Mania Plus. I recall that I was still putting the finishing touches on the original Sonic Mania video review when I had a copy of Plus sitting here on my desk.

I took a few days to myself, just to rest and recharge, before I dove head first into producing the Sonic Mania Plus video. Except that when Sonic Mania came out in August of 2017, I finished the game once as Sonic & Tails. I started files as Tails and Knuckles, but I hadn’t really played too far with them, knowing I’d need to replay the whole game multiple times for video capture purposes. When Plus came out, I was coming off a stint of having replayed Sonic Mania four times for the capture – as Sonic & Tails (with the emeralds), as Tails, Knuckles, and Sonic alone (without the emeralds). I was not actually in the mood to keep playing it.

So my playthrough of Mania Plus was… sluggish. I think the game had been out for a week by the time I’d finished it as Mighty, Ray, and done a full playthrough of Encore Mode. But, by early August I had a video review script written and production was starting to get underway on the Sonic Mania Plus video review. I had a sketch of what I thought the review would look like in the end (called a “shotlist,” which I have uploaded here) and I was starting to capture the video I needed and whatever else.

There was one problem with this: SAGE 2018. It dropped in the middle of August and upended everything I was doing. It was a tremendous undertaking. I wrote nearly 30 pages of text about 85 games in just six days. I thought I could handle it, and in a lot of ways I did, but it left me absolutely fried. On top of the growing burnout from spending now four and a half months doing two Sonic Mania video reviews back to back.

After SAGE, I was going to take a few days off, maybe a week. It ended up being nearly four weeks. That still didn’t feel like enough. It threw everything off balance.

Getting those gears turning again was a struggle. It was October now, and I had plans to do other videos for October. Halloween videos. I split my time researching potential Halloween videos with capturing the rest of my footage (a week), doing artwork (a week and a half), and getting my voice over in order (another week, as the stress was starting to get to me, and that doesn’t make for a good environment to do voice work).

I actually tried to cut corners on my video capturing. Rather than capture footage from six full-length playthroughs of Sonic Mania, I scaled things way back, hoping I wouldn’t need quite as much b-roll as I usually capture. Instead of playing Sonic Mania to completion six more times, I:

Captured one entire playthrough of Encore Mode, minus collecting the seven emeralds. I already had a completed file with the emeralds, so having two files would let me compare the endings.

Because I wanted footage of Ray and Mighty also in Mania Mode, I split one playthrough in half between them: every three levels, I would trade off. Ray would take Green Hill, Chemical Plant, and Studiopolis, then Mighty would do Flying Battery, Press Garden, and Stardust Speedway before I’d switch back to Ray again for the next three. This gave me half of the game as each character, and one complete playthrough between them.

Similarly, I needed footage of Sonic, Tails and Knuckles in Mania mode, but since I had Sonic Mania Plus on PS4 and my original review was produced using the PC version, my save couldn’t be transferred. Instead, I grinded out Blue Spheres medals until I could unlock Debug Mode, and summarily, stage select. Then I just did the same thing, but every two levels: Sonic would get Green Hill and Chemical Plant, Tails would get Studiopolis and Flying Battery, Knuckles would get Press Garden and Stardust Speedway, etc.

Unfortunately, even with being smart like that, it wasn’t enough, and in the middle of editing everything together, I still had to go back and capture footage of specific moments to fill in the gaps I was missing. The lesson is: though you’ll throw away 99% of it, you’ll never have enough b-roll captured. Never ever.

Which brings us to the end of October, me not getting to do any Halloween videos, and the final, finished Sonic Mania Plus review. This time, 20 minutes of video in four months.

Could I have been faster? I don’t know if that’s for me to say. Even though I took a month off (almost all of September), I was still struggling really hard with burnout on the Sonic Mania Plus video. I work on these videos from home, and I have an incredibly poor work-life balance as a result. Essentially, I wake up every morning, turn on my PC, and work on whatever until I go to bed. The only breaks I take are to eat, go to the bathroom, or run errands (shop for food, help babysit my nephews, etc.)

What this really means is something that’s familiar to people who have struggled with burnout, and that’s days where all you do is sit around and worry about work but not actually do any work. I’m trying to get better about this, to have hard cutoff points in the afternoon where I stop working and let myself relax, but that’s easier said than done when you relax at the same place you also work. It’s a learning process for sure.

So, like, yeah, it could have been done a few weeks earlier, but that’s assuming I wasn’t burnt out from working too hard, which means I wouldn’t have worked super hard to get to that point anyway, so no, maybe it wouldn’t have been done a few weeks earlier. I’m not a robot.

I am, however, incredibly stressed. Still stressed about moving to Nevada, stressed about being so far behind on the videos I promised to put out, stressed out about things I won’t even mention here on tumblr because they’re personal issues.

But I am going as fast as I can. I might even be going faster than is healthy for my body.

You’ll get your videos when I’m actually done with them and not a second sooner.

But for now, I need a lot of rest. It’s time for an extended rest-and-recharge session. I still have the promised Sonic Forces video to figure out, and that’ll get done eventually, but I’m running on fumes, I need to gas back up, and it’s a big, empty tank.