The Nature of Failure - A Year in Review.

This post might be a long one, but I've decided to do a bit of self-reflection on the past year and - in particular - the nature of a failed project.

Why? Because after hundreds of hours of work, I've decided to cancel a second massive video right before it was supposed to be released (The first one that was cancelled was of course the Campaign for North Africa video, but you can expect to see that return early next year).

The project i'm talking about is RISK Geoguessr.

I'd been wanting to do another Geoguessr video for some time - but not wanting to just do "Impossible Geoguessr 2", I waited until I had an idea for something a bit different. So I turned Geoguessr into a board game, loosely based on the game RISK.

This video failed for a lot of different reasons, and its honestly heartbreaking that it got this far before I had to bin it.

So, what was the problem? These issues, in no particular order:

• The Audio. This was the first video I recorded on a new computer, and despite making sure it was all set up correctly - i made a last-minute change to the settings and accidentally overwrote my own voice with the much louder discord audio. The solution to this was to manually re-record all of my lines in post and hope no one noticed. What fun.
• That discord audio was itself, for whatever reason, really terrible. This alone wouldn't cause the video to be cancelled (Hell, the Torture Board Game video has awful audio and that still came out) but its compounding problem #1.
• The footage is a pain. I had footage from some (but not all) particpants, all of which was in different resolutions with lots to crop and blur. My own footage also had to be zoomed in with an inconsistent scale (different width/height) so doing quick zooms wasn't possible.
• The Idea flopped. It was - frankly - too complicated, and the rules were very poorly thought out. The defenders advantage was changed during the recording, and the length of the game itself is probably something like 30 hours or so (we only lasted 5 on the recording). This lead to a very anti-climactic end where we just stopped playing.
• It's just not that funny. Watching it back now some things are (as they always are), but there were too many technical issues, the complexity, and the drinking (whoops) lead it to being very incoherent to follow. When I realised it wasn't going to work I thought maybe I'd just string together some highlights to save it but what is funny is too based on the context to work.

So, I scrapped it. Video is cancelled. Yet another multi-hundred hour video down the drain.

Here's a little taste of what might've been. 

And so, as i prepare to take some time off this Christmas, I look back at the year of 2023 with...mixed feelings.

On a vague personal note - my life itself has been turned upside down multiple times in the last 15 or so months. I had to move internationally multiple times, deal with visa shenanigans,  and lots of other stuff I won't get into.  All in all, everything ended very well - but becuase of these distractions and the failed projects, I got a lot less content out than i had originally intended.

And yet, I think the future is bright. Since about mid-october everything really began to come together, and with it my content output did too. I'm really happy with how my last 3 videos in particular turned out (I think the Realistic Game of Life is the best board game I've made so far). And I won't lie - having each video be sponsored has actually been incredibly helpful with keeping me on schedule. Having some marketing manager emailing me going "so where is it you said it'd be done yesterday" really keeps me on track.

But I can't help but wonder what might've been. If Campaign for North Africa had actually worked those three times I tried to do it. If RISK Geoguessr had been a bit more thought out and I wasn't trapped trying to fix it in post. But on the flip side, I learned an awful lot about what makes some of these videos work, and what doesn't. What makes one of these games good (Game of Life) and bad (RISK Geoguessr). And I'll take all of that with me into the next year.

So then - what have we got for Christmas?

Well, not gona lie, once I realised I wasn't going to have RISK Geoguessr for that slot I nearly shit myself. But thankfully I had one last card up my sleeve - Somewhere in the Shadow. Honestly an S-tier video, one of the funniest I've never released. So I'm going to take that and make it my little Christmas video. It's not what I intended, but it is something.

I'm also considering making a "Best of 2023" video for release on New Year's Day. I'm undecided though. Might put a poll up and see if you guys might enjoy a year-long highlights reel. I promise it won't be more than 2 hours long :)

Stay tuned for a lot more next year. I'm planning to keep to at least two video per month for the foreseeable future, and I have the necessary ideas to keep that ball rolling.

Thanks for reading my ramble. I hope your holidays are - at the very least - mediocre and mildly festive. See you next year :)