Architect Address July 2023

What’s up, how are you doing and welcome one and all to this: the architect address - hoo boy it’s a hot one right now I have been melting all week and I’ve got my windows closed to record this so let’s get on with it. This is what’s known in certain circles as the Architect Address, a secret update video especially for you lovely patrons where I talk about some stuff that’s been going on with the channel, answer some questions and chat about the videos that came out recently.

The first thing I want to talk about is a question a few people have asked me about recently and that’s how I record, archive and deal with footage because for this job my god do I need of it. So basically, actually recording stuff is the easy part - back in the day you were stuck with crappy software like fraps or hypercam 2 or whatever it’s called but nowadays there’s lots of really lightweight software I’ve been relying on for years, and will have running more or less whenever I’m playing a game. For PC stuff I’ll use OBS which is software most associated with streaming but is a pretty powerful piece of kit with a lot of  useful plugins if you’re okay with a slightly unintuitive interface and for console stuff, usually the switch I’ll use the built in Elgato recorder.

All that stuff gets collected in a raw, uncompressed state in a hard drive dedicated to current footage, generally speaking this equals maybe a terabyte every two ish months, high quality footage if you didn’t know is HUGE particularly when there’s a lot going on onscreen and it’s THIS which is a source of the actual problems. See, big footage is harder and more clunky to import into stuff, it’s more likely to get corrupted and it’s also expensive to store because it eats up hard drive space like nobody’s business, what this means is that it needs to be encoded into a more manageable form using a program like handbrake which will cut the size of footage by about two thirds. Encoding is very hard on your computer’s processor and take a very long time but is well worth doing in my experience because particularly aging not very fast storage drives often can’t cope with uncompressed video very well but do just fine with properly encoded footage.

After that, or sometimes before depending on how much I’ve procrastinated, it’s time to name the footage so I can find it later. Anyone who is planning on doing what I do and recording a bunch of footage, DO THIS, DO NOT HAVE A BUNCH OF RANDOMLY NAMED FILES because it will become unmanageable and a pain in the ass to go back and rename everything very quickly. I spent a few hours manually renaming a lot of my old footage to list the game I was playing because I got sick of scanning through thumbnails to find what I needed like an idiot.

Even after all that admin, though you’ve still got hundreds of gigs of footage clogging up your drives and so I have at time of writing three distinct storage drives plugged into my PC with complete archives going back to 2017, that’s not when I started the channel but prior to starting archiving I used to delete all my footage after every video meaning some classic shots and moments are forever lost to time - storage drives are not that expensive in the grand scheme, but at the volumes you need for footage, we’re talking double digit terabytes they can get pretty pricey so my advice would either be prepared to shell out a lot of cash or be really aggressive with encoding to pack those files in as efficiently as possible.

That’s… sort of it, that’s a verbal guide to how I handle footage and let me tell you it’s a pain in the backside but well worth doing once you’ve got years of archives to work with like I do, hope that helps people who asked!

Next up is the first video I’ve released recently and that is how tears of the kingdom keeps you playing forever and let’s be honest I was never NOT going to release a tears of the kingdom video, come on - the interesting problem I had to solve when it came to thinking about this one though was what I was going to make the video about because err, as good as the game is it kind of does all the same things well and has all the same weaknesses as Breath of the Wild, so I’d kind of be repeating myself if I just talked about systemic mechanics again, it was a tricky one.

Eventually, however, I settled on zeroing in on the one thing that ToTK does better than breath of the wild and that’s how it handles its core gameplay loop, I think in retrospect the previous game is a little… bland? Compared to tears and once you’re kind of sick of the shrines there’s not that much to encourage you to keep adventuring but right up until the end of TOTK and I was still getting lost and going on weirdo side journeys so that was great fun and well work making the video about.

One slightly awkward thing about writing this one though is I’ve already done a sort of dedicated video on both beginnings and endings, neither of which I think were… that great, to be honest - so I enjoyed getting to revisit those topics even if it was just a bit of a flyby. In particular, I really liked getting to talk about the forza horizons 5 intro it’s one of the best introductions I’ve ever seen, to the point that it tricked me into playing a kind of game I don’t really enjoy that much. Equally, I quite like the messaging of the video at the end, of sort of having a relationship with a game on your own terms, you don’t have to end a game when the credits roll of you get all the achievements, it’s more about finding a suitable wrapup for your experience for yourself and having the self control to call it there… something I sort of lack.

As an aside, I kind of want to voice my dissatisfaction with Terra Invicta in particular, that game literally only gets a mention because I was very upset with how it’s so very nearly the game I have always wanted to play and it’s just too bloated and slow and fiddly for its own good. I could’ve put a whole host of other much more visually interesting games in there to be honest but nope, I needed to vent and so Terra Invicta gets dunked on.

This video’s performance started out a little on the slow side but it’s done pretty well with the benefit of about a month’s hindsight which is good - I’d hate to make such an obvious video on such a rich subject and have it do poorly, that’d suck wouldn’t it ahahahaha

Anyway so the video that just came out is one all about creativity and honestly I can’t escape the feeling I kind of fucked this one. Longtime viewers may remember me talking about wanting to make exactly this video a very long time ago and it’s been kind of a white whale for me ever since. I tried to make it work for a long time but my god could I just not quite fit everything I wanted to talk about in or play all the games I wanted to play or just say what I felt I needed to get across. Honestly I could’ve spent another month on this one getting it right but equally I reckon I made the right call getting it out in a state that’s at least okay rather than going around the rewrite drain for a fifth time, yeesh.

I think the difficulty of this video comes in two parts, first of all is the inherent challenge of explaining why creativity is fun and what makes it fun in a somewhat objective manner. Usually with these sorts of questions I can skate around the incredibly difficult to write problem of explaining what fun is and how it works which sort of by its nature is intuitive but very hard to put into words and here in particular it’s fairly elemental to the premise of the video so I couldn’t really avoid it and so needed to spend a lot of very tiresome effort just sort of gesturing at the idea that yes making things is inherently fun but it’s the job of games to empower that fun which is difficult to explain or elaborate upon in a way that’s interesting.

Second is that for a variety of reasons I’m not the most visually or aesthetically gifted person in the world, and video is a visual medium so I had to get a lot of footage of me painting, building and designing things that invariably would look like shit and make it really hard to actually illustrate my point. Equally I don’t know how to compose music and you can’t really show that process in a way that’s interesting, nor can you really quickly and efficiently demonstrate any other creative process because a lot of the fun and the challenge is internally derived which is both the problem at the core of the video’s topic and the core of why it didn’t turn out so good. Y’see how this is a harder topic than you might think to explain right, a lot of my videos kind of slide into these positions where I’m asked to explain and justify the nature of a fundamental aspect of human psychology or art and let me tell you it’s hard every time. Why is problem solving fun, why is tension fun why is creativity fun they just are you already know they are can we just roll with it?

I think another more obvious error I should’ve really caught was my choice of framing narrative, I think music as a whole was a strong example to use because it’s a very common theme for games but like everything else there are no games really about composition, so it’s hard to use to make a complete point. Why are there lots of games about music but none that are about making music isn’t exactly an attention grabbing pitch and even then it doesn’t really explain what I’m talking about very well. Maybe I should’ve leaned into painting or something and made passpartout the focus a little more or maybe I should’ve just gone with a more generic look at creativity,  , it’s a bit of a mess. Under the circumstances I think this one not doing very well at all is pretty justified though not quite as badly as the companions video which I thought was quite good so who even knows.

What do I like about the video? Let’s see if I can come up with something… err… I think that… the conclusion relating to art being a function of human perception and therefore outside the limits of what we can do with computers is a pretty salient one, particularly as it relates to AI stuff and that whole emerging sphere which I think I quite rightly declined to really go into, because that would’ve lit the comments on fire.

Anyway, I think that’s quite enough, this feels like it’s quite a long one as it is, I’ll see ya around, bye!