Early access to Klonoa DF Retro Episode + a LONG overdue channel update!

Hey everyone, Coury here. It's been a long time! Way, way too long.

I’ve been thinking about writing this message for awhile now, because if you haven’t noticed, there's been a bit of a lull in new content on the channel. This is certainly the longest we’ve gone without a new video, and we’re both very sorry about that. But before I focus on that, we wanted to share a bonus with our supporters.

This is an early-access link to the Digital Foundry Retro episode on the Klonoa series that we worked with John Linneman on. I appear in several segments throughout the video, accounting for roughly 20ish minutes of the 2 hour runtime. John and I have been talking about doing this video for a long time, and with the release of the new remakes it was the perfect reason to move forward on it.

In addition to the Klonoa video, the success of the DF Supporter Program has made it possible for us to help John with all future DF Retro episodes to some extent - whether it be capturing gameplay, creating frame rate comparisons, shooting B-Roll, or gathering other miscellaneous materials. We might also help with writing and even appear in some episodes when it’s a subject that makes sense for us to contribute to in that way (i.e. me in the Klonoa episode, and Try in the next one), but we won’t necessarily have an on-camera presence in every episode, and DF Retro will very much remain John Linneman’s show.

So in short, we’re providing a modest amount of freelance assistance so that John can continue making DF Retro bigger, better, and more frequent. However, My Life in Gaming is still My Life in Gaming, and that’s just Try and me. The DF deal changes nothing about what MLiG is and what we do. We’ll still be streaming every Sunday and still releasing our own videos on our own channel.

But what videos, you ask? OK, yeah… it’s been awhile since the last proper episode. I’m just gonna be candid about everything, and much of this will be a stream of consciousness. If you want a TL;DR, well, I needed a little break and Try has been buried under a ton of freelance work. All of this went on for longer than we anticipated. While we do have things in the works now, this unintentional months-long gap in content has left us wondering whether it might be appropriate to change the Patreon charges to per-video release system, versus the monthly contributions. We aren’t sure if that’s the right move though, and would like to hear your thoughts.

Now, the longer version:

Well firstly, I just want to take the blame for the lack of content on the channel since April. Neither of us can afford to truly do MLiG as our sole gig, and we’ve taken on additional video production and editing work to make it work. Try has had many more freelance projects coming his way than usual this year, especially through the spring and summer, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, he’s been frustrated that he hasn’t had much time for MLiG projects the past few months. As for myself, I started a full time remote job shooting video and editing for a company in 2020. The job has been great and is super flexible. Sometimes I’m busy, sometimes I’m not - I’ll occasionally have to travel to shoot video, which is pretty neat. In spite of this, I do have plenty of freedom to get MLiG videos done in between work projects, so there's no excuse for me to have not gotten videos out.

We’re coming up on 9 years of doing the channel this October, and after the MiSTer episode (which I was working on off and on for about a year), I needed to back away for a minute because I felt like I needed a little bit of a break. I thought it would just be for a couple of weeks, but it turned into an unplanned / unofficial hiatus that I wish I’d acknowledged in a more up-front way to our Patrons, subscribers… and myself. Even though I wasn’t releasing videos, I never actually stopped working on stuff. Whether it be shooting/scripting/capturing for upcoming episodes, the channel and videos were always at the forefront of my mind. Plus, we kept streaming every Sunday

I think a bigger factor in play is that since around late 2020 I’ve been struggling with a sort of “imposter syndrome” that's been a bear to deal with. For me, I think a lot of it comes down to this: As the channel has grown, and the dives have gotten deeper, I get so nervous that maybe I won’t go into something as much as people expect and that has made absolutely dread writing scripts. I end up re-writing stuff so often and will just get stuck in a loop revising stuff day after day, losing precious time.

I don't know exactly when it started, but I feel like it really kicked in during late 2020 when I felt I was losing a bit of my identity in my writing. For some reason, I felt like I could never grasp the “Hey, look at this cool thing. Here’s some neat things to get excited about with it” that came so easily before. As such, writing scripts has become my absolute least favorite part of the process, and it shouldn’t be.

Another factor at play here is time management. I’ve mentioned it during the stream from time to time, but I don’t often talk about how I’ve struggled with ADHD my entire life. The thing is, I was never officially diagnosed with it until 2018 when I was 40. Once I was, everything made a lot of sense to me. My wife said to me “oh, I’ve always known,” which I guess is telling.

Anyway, once I started getting some help with it, I felt like I was just firing on all cylinders. I was efficient, productive, and lost weight. 2018 - 2019 had the episodes that I’m most proud of as well as the video logs that were so much fun to make.

Once I moved at the very start of 2020, working on the house, family stuff, and then the pandemic… it felt like things started to unravel a bit. I started strong, but maybe it was a combination of that stuff, plus how depressing and hopeless a lot of the world felt to me, I started getting lost in menial tasks and suddenly the whole day had gone by. I started to gain weight again. Tired all the time. It was a slow burn, but I just haven’t been feeling very good about myself.

So I decided to really try to get things back under control, and things have been increasingly more successful. I’m getting my eating habits back under control, getting more sleep, and just trying to stay on task. I have good days and bad days, but what I really need to do is push myself to create more. I was supposed to have my updated setup tour video released by now, but I decided to push it a little further out  because it felt really weird to make a video on it when I haven’t released a video in a few months. Sorta like “Hey, here's how I make the show… that I haven’t released an episode of in several months”.

As part of the push to create more, I’m throwing around the idea of returning to the video logs. Maybe weekly? Mainly because it really helped me with my confidence in speaking, presenting and being more efficient in making videos in general.

So anyway, this little hiatus had Try and I talking about the possibility of switching the Patreon to be “per video”. This may alleviate some of the guilt we feel when it takes so long to release videos, and possibly also motivate us to get more videos done. The downside is that you might run into a situation like last December (when we released 3 videos in a month), which might result in Patreon charging more than you’re used to. It also doesn’t account for the size of each video. It’s hard to say whether the pros and cons of either method would play out the way they are in our heads, though.

The way it's set up would be that you’re charged for the total number of videos from the previous month on the first of the following. Example: You’re signed up at 1 dollar per video, we release 3 videos in December, so you get charged 3 dollars on January 1st.

Patreon does have an option to limit the amount you can be charged for each month, so if you just want to pay 1 dollar total (or whatever amount you want to cap it at), then you won't be charged more than that. And of course, the video log stuff wouldn’t count towards that total or anything.

So my question is, what are people’s opinions on that? Are you subscribed to any Patreons that do that? How has the experience been?

I apologize for the relatively inane ramblings of this post, but it was really important for me to give you an update on what's been going on behind the scenes here. To be honest, it felt really good to just say that all out loud like that and get it all out in the open. 

Anyway, you can look forward to a return of regular episodes soon with the Memory Card save preservation video I’m working on now. Take care everyone!